Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Sunday Bloody Sunday!


A return to Monday nights is just what City Homicide needed after being put under the pump on Sundays earlier this year.

Seven's cavalier attitude to scheduling sometimes does more harm than good, Homicide at one time owned Monday nights before Seven decided to move it to Sundays out of the way of Underbelly, probably a shrewd move but given that Homicide's core audience is over 50 that sort of timeslot juggling doesn't go down well with that crowd.

At any rate after the ill fated Sunday experiment the show is back and returning to prominence on Monday nights, more importantly it is reviving the fortunes of Seven's Crime Investigation Australia ripoff - Beyond the Darklands, itself a victim of a catastophic Sunday sojourn earlier in the year!

Ten, riding low at the moment thanks to the slow-burning 7pm slot (yes I'm being generous here) almost, almost had a good night with Idol and Good News Week both doing nice numbers.

I say almost because the whole thing was brought undone with Dexter. This show has an admittedly clever premise (the hero is a serial killer who only kills bad guys - yay!) but it has three strikes against it:

a) It comes on after 2 hours of family friendly light entertainment, the endless pile of carcasses of high-brow shows after Rove on a Sunday night should be an indicator of what happens to this kind of show on Ten
b) It's already aired on (Premium) cable
c) It's already out on DVD - you only have to witness the buzz about True Blood, a violent, sexy vampire epic from HBO which was unleashed on DVD barely a month ago to realise that people who want to see these shows are seeking them out and not waiting for the networks to get around to it.

Even more baffling is that Ten decided to schedule it 9.30 Mondays after it failed earlier this year also at 9.30 Mondays!!! There's just no excuse!

Nine was engaging in some state to state weirdness last night - the show Drop Dead Diva has been dropped in some (read WIN) markets in favour of The Mentalist (like that hasn't been repeated enough!) while Adelaide inexplicably dropped The Big Bang Theory for a reality show called Animal Emergency - what on Earth were they hoping to gain from that?

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